In the context of normal Christianity they get there by repenting and so on. In the context of Universalism they get there because everyone goes to Heaven after death.
I honestly thought you were building up to saying we’d have to be able to temporarily get our memories wiped, and periodically live out an experience much like the one you happen to be in right now — you know, with conflict and striving and problems and looking forward to stuff?
Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? There would have to be more to it than just believe in God and ask forgiveness. Because down here, people keep sinning. If people keep sinning in Heaven, how would it be different from here? I mean, I guess Hitler couldn’t kill anyone, but he could certainly be unpleasant to be around.
Has to be more to it than that if it isn’t Der_Trihs’ suggestion that God rips out large chunks of their souls for their own (and everyone else’s) good.
And if they’re horrible people here, what’s to prevent them from being horrible there?
Now I personally believe that God never gives up on anyone, in this life or the next. I’m not sure that equates to universal salvation; maybe some can refuse God’s love for eternity. But whatever Heaven is (ain’t never been there, they tell me it’s nice), ISTM to be a given that you can’t bring your sin in with you. One way or another, you’ve got to leave it behind. (Which is the real meaning of repentance, not any transitory expression of regret, no matter how genuine.) What that involves, I don’t reckon we can really know on this side of that one-way door at the end of each of our lives here.
There are definitely infinitely many ways to do some things.
Start writing a number. In binary. First digit is 0 or 1. Whatever the first digit is, the second digit is 0 or 1. Ditto the third. And so on ad infinitum. There are (countably) infinitely many numbers you can write down this way, given an infinite amount of time. And since we’re talking about Heaven, I think we can assume that. And if we can do something that simple and boring in infinitely many ways, there are surely infinitely many ways to do things where more choices are inherent in the doing.
Their evil nature would be changed so they wouldn’t have the same evil and unhealthy desires, beliefs, dysfunctions, etc. Hitler wouldn’t be a fascist, Bundy wouldn’t be a psychopath, Manson wouldn’t be a psychotic, etc.
Then they wouldn’t be the same people in the first place, just brainwashed puppets. Doing a delete-and-replace on their minds like that is just destroying them while replacing them with a fake in order to pretend otherwise.
But unless you have something, @Der_Trihs suggestion is winning right now as the most reasonable proposition.
I mean, we can shrug and say “mysterious ways” but that’s really a concession that, to us right now, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
And Alex wouldn’t be a droog.
I would certainly hope not. We can’t have any real ultraviolence (or unsuccessful attempts at it) in Heaven. I often wonder if there could even be simulated violence like wrestling or live action Call of Duty.
I wonder if God uses the Ludovico Technique.
Right, and we know there are belief systems where the end goal is to be freed from what binds to the “self”.
The “we’re still just like ourselves all along” idea of “Heaven” is also involved with the frequent comment as to how eternity would get boring which ignores that the classic concept of “eternal” is a state outside of directional linear time. It’s not a matter of trying to find something to fill a googolplex years.
True. At least in the traditional Christian concept (as opposed to some more contemporary trends), it’s not a matter of just “say the magic words” to get to “Heaven”. You have to have received the Grace of Salvation, which is transformational (a process in some of the older traditions, a singular experience in others).
So, yeah, to put it crudely, stands to reason you can’t expect to continue to enjoy being a hateful asshole and enter the pearly gates. And you really should have turned the new page at some point before death.
I mean, I suppose you could look at it like, if you have made it to that promised shore, your fallen state has been healed so you stand in the Divine Presence and behold what is absolutely right and good and what is really the Truth…
…why would you continue to WANT what’s “wrong”, that would be absurdly perverse.
The issue is that those scenarios aren’t what most people think of as “heavenly”. Most people want an afterlife where they remain themselves.
And the point of the concept of heaven is to be appealing to people. If heaven doesn’t sound heavenly, then it won’t attract people to the religion.
Well, I don’t know that people who take the free will defense seriously and people who have a literal interpretation of the Adam and Eve-thing have a large overlap. The free will defense, at its core, is just an argument that shows that the four premises of (1) omniscience, (2) omnipotence, (3) omnibenevolence and (4) the existence of evil in the world are not inconsistent (as those who propose the existence of a logical problem of evil allege), by means of showing that they can be simultaneously true in the presence of a fifth premise, concerning the offsetting moral value of human free will. That’s in and of itself a perfectly sound argument, and crucially doesn’t require it to be true that there is free will, since if there is any context in which a set of premises can be simultaneously true, they can’t be logically contradictory.
There’s a position that it isn’t god who sends people to heaven or hell, but that ending up in heaven or hell is itself a voluntary act of turning towards or away from god; rejecting his benevolence, thus consigning oneself to god’s absence, or accepting it, and ‘glorying in his magnificence’ or whatever have you. That at least makes it plausible that god couldn’t have set us up like that from the start, the necessary choice requiring a lifetime to ultimately make; and indeed in setting us up so he would’ve violated our ability to choose freely.
I don’t want to re-litigate on our discussions on the matter, but just as an analogy, consider a nonalgorithmic process. There is clearly a definite process there, it’s not random, but there can’t be a set of steps by which any given outcome is produced, as that would define an algorithm. However, if you were to use an algorithmic facility to try to ‘explain’ it, it would look exactly like an algorithmic process plus interspersed random events. But this dichotomy of ‘random or reasoned’ is just an artefact of the faculty (algorithmic step-by-step reasoning) you use to model the process, not of the process itself. It isn’t a priori true that everything has to be either random or given by a chain of steps.
I’d definitely disagree with that.
Remember, a huge proportion of the US public believes in Creationism – I think Gallup put it as 40% of people believing in the statement “Humans were created in their current form less than 10,000 years ago”. And free will is by a long way the most popular “solution” to the problem of evil.
More anecdotally, I listen to a lot of discussions around theology and hermeneutics, and when questions of why there’s hurricanes or baby cancer come up, I don’t recall any other answer than that we sinned, and it’s not God’s fault because free will.
I have lots of problems with this kind of set up, but they aren’t related to the logic of it. A case could be made for some kind of “staging room” where you choose to be with God or not.
My problems with this line of theory relate more to what information we actually have presented to us, and associated propositions like us all “knowing the truth in our hearts” or whatever. And the choice being coupled with whether I burn (though not all Christians take this view). But, as I say, in the abstract, sure, we can potentially make a case for a God starting souls off in a non-heaven place.
I also don’t want to go down that road again (it would definitely become a big tangent for this thread), but I am intrigued by this explanation.
What do you mean by a non-algorithmic process here and a set of steps?
For example, I wouldn’t call a chaotic process “algorithmic” but I would also say it would be misleading to say a set of steps couldn’t arrive at an outcome. It may be impossible to retroactively come up with steps to arrive at a given outcome, but that’s not the same thing as saying that outcome didn’t occur from a set of steps. Think of it like encryption.
To me, there’s a difference between vaguely gesturing at ‘free will’ to get-out-of-jail free, or actually employing Plantinga’s argument. Notably, the former requires there to actually be free will (‘people do bad things because god doesn’t want to meddle with free will’), while the latter is fine with its nonexistence. I’m not sure that has much traction in daily debate.
A nonalgorithmic process, to me, is anything you couldn’t do on a computer (so assuming some kind of Church-Turing thesis here). Solving the halting problem, predicting the existence of a finite difference in the energies between ground and excited states for certain quantum systems, and so on. Anything that can be specified in a finite sequence of discrete steps is inherently algorithmic.
A chaotic process is still very much algorithmic. It’s just an algorithm whose output depends very strongly on small variations of its input.
If there’s a distinction between the get-out-of-jail free will, and Plantinga’s argument, then our focus in this thread should be on the former, right?
The OP begins with “Non Christians often” and then describes “the usual Christian answer”. It’s clearly talking about the popular invocations of these topics, and clearly most people are not going to know who Plantinga is, or be aware that his argument distinguishes between showing a hypothetical extra proposition like free will “defeats” the logical argument from evil, and claiming that free will exists and is the solution.
Let’s go to the beginning of our tangent…
I was saying that the way creationists use free will as a get out of jail doesn’t work on scrutiny. You seem to be agreeing with this, but adding that Plantinga’s free will defence isn’t defeated by the objection I raised. But that’s only because Plantinga doesn’t assert there’s necessarily free will, only that a proposition like it could defeat the logical argument for god. If we actually add the proposition of free will then it is exactly the same as what I was saying.
So, IOW this seems like a bit of a pointless objection for you to raise, but let me know if I’m missing something.
Parallel to this is the notion that, if there is a god or supreme being who created us along with all of the universe, that being would also exist outside of directional linear time, since they created space and time.
So the common belief that god is watching over us, intervenes to help when needed, and answers our prayers if we are good and pray hard enough, can’t really be possible. Carl Sagan pointed out that science can explain every effect and preceding cause going back to the Big Bang, it just can’t explain the singularity beforehand. So if there is a god, he said, it’s a god who got things started and sat back to relax for the rest of eternity. He built a clock, wound it up, and considered his job done. Or, I like to picture a theoretical god who set up the universe equivalent of one of those elaborate domino setups, and tipping over the very first domino was the Big Bang.
In that scenario, we can’t really consider ourselves to have free will any more than a train can choose to be free of its rails and go anywhere it wants to go.
I think the “boring” thing rests on lots of assumptions anyway.
For one, if I really remain as I am, then that includes forgetting things; having a finite memory. Perhaps by the time you get to the millionth distinct experience you have forgotten the first ones. Or just the number of rich experiences is infinite.
A lot of it just comes down to the failure of our imagination. When we try to imagine heaven most of us actually conceive of something far more limited and rigid than even our lives now. You’d get bored in a week.
Randy Alcorn wrote a comprehensive book about the Christian Heaven titled Heaven that answers every major question people have about it with direct references to the source material (while acknowledging the limits of our understanding) and refutes the various misconceptions and caricatures people (believers and atheists) have developed about it. It isn’t playing harps on clouds in white or an endless church sermon.
That is an interesting premise, but if it’s classical, it is far from currently conventional. Eternal is taken as a synonym of forever, and is taken to mean durational in time.
In order for that argument to work, one would need to have that fifth premise be something coherent, something understandable. Kind of like resolving the unstoppable force versus the immovable object by saying “one of them is yellow”. Those words may make coherent sense, but contribute no context that actually affects the conundrum. If free will is an undefinable concept, then it’s no more valid than to say those for concepts are not mutually inconsistent because of the moral value of yellow.